Sleary’s sentiment is a useful truth for earnest artists. And also an excellent justification for a night at the theater, where learning and amusement should never be mutually exclusive. So kindly read on about the Lookingglass Theatre, resurrecting Heidi Stillman’s “Hard Times” adaptation from 2001 and applying it anew to These Times, mostly with success.

Aside from encapsulating why some of us work so hard to avoid an honest job, Sleary’s bon mot — spoken here by a kindhearted man of the circus — runs afoul of the industrial barons and hard-nosed educators of Coketown, the setting of “Hard Times” and a semifictional stand-in for Manchester, England, which happens to be the town of my childhood. These gentlemen, for they all are gentlemen, worry that the working classes are acquiring, as the infamous Mr. Bounderby puts it, a taste for turtle soup and venison, supped with a gold spoon. And they’re smart enough to know that when that happens, their gilt-edged brand of capitalist privilege will be under siege, there not being enough turtle soup for all.

It took a while (my milltown school still bore some resemblance to the institution run by Mr. Gradgrind, and I’m not that old). But change did come. To some degree.

Like most of Dickens’ prose, “Hard Times” is a multicharacter extravaganza. Unlike, say, “Oliver Twist,” the story is not dominated by one obvious figure, although most of Dickens’ authorial sentiment is wrapped up in the persona of the worker Stephen Blackpool (David Catlin), unfairly assailed by the bosses and a kind soul, fallen on hard times not of his own making. But Stillman, even more than in 2001, wraps her adaptation around the journey of Louisa (Cordelia Dewdney), the young daughter of the utilitarian Gradgrind (Raymond Fox), married off by her dad to the creepy bounder Bounderby (Troy West) without regard to her own affection or well-being.

Dewdney’s intense Louisa is Stillman’s main thread, as this piece charts not only the oppression she suffers at the hands of her clueless (if loving) father but her subsequent political awakening and circus-fueled emotional emancipation. Most important of all here is Louisa’s friendship with Sissy Jupe (Audrey Anderson), an unfortunate of the ring, abandoned by her father but still filled with enough love to save Louisa from all the lousy men in her life, a clutch that includes her profligate brother, Tom (JJ Phillips) and a mostly indolent suitor, Harthouse (Nathan Hosner).

The upside of this perfectly valid approach is that you have an anchor on the open Dickensian ocean of human pain and kindness, a character who comes into her own and even, thanks to some subtle anachronisms in the very last scene, seems to cross over into our own times. The downside is that some of the other characters fall into the narrative shadows, most especially Sissy, who has always been the figure that moves me the most, especially as played here by Anderson, who gives one of the subtlest and most authentic performances. In this version, it feels like she is there to save the richer Louisa, which does not feel entirely fair to Sissy to me, although it is impossible to adapt this book in viable fashion without making such choices. And Louisa is where Stillman landed.

Some of the cast in this show were around in 2001 (I remember being moved by Fox then, and he is more resonant now, even while playing a character with limited access to his own emotions). Catlin is as rich in his work as he ever was. Hosner is complex too and Dewdney takes a very deep dive into repression and oppression.

It’s easy to forget, of course, that Dickensian characters are also ordinary people, doing their best with the cards they are dealt. They don’t know they represent cataclysmic social themes, and this show has acquired a lot more psychological weight. As a result, you don’t get the same class-consciousnsss, the same spangles-and-sawdust vista of the circus rolling into a soot-black town and offering up a vision of self-actualizing escape, performed by exotic outsiders who represented the working class, actually in control of their own bodies and destiny. But then these are serious times, and that clearly is what Stillman and her collaborators are feeling; Dan Ostling’s set now is much more filled with shadow, less interested in environment and mystery and more invested in the trauma of the interior. Fair enough. Dickens would have understood.

They call the show “Hard Times for These Times” and a worthy lesson is on their minds. With just enough amusement to bring a great and complicated novel to life.